MCI INTERVIEW MCI INTERVIEW
According to Bye, the biggest challenge in the industry right now is how many spectrum frequencies you can squeeze into a device, in order to ensure global roaming, capacity and keep the device cost effective. A tall order in a world that is moving from being one dominated by voice to one dominated by data.
those customers over and at a future point in time we will take down the legacy iDen network,” Bye says. “The key here is that we can manage that transition very gracefully.
It’s not
like we have to rip and replace, we complete the migration then take down the other network and reduce a lot of costs we’ve had to bear with that previous network. It alters our cost structure fundamentally, but allows us to migrate and upgrade going forward.” The legacy iDen network, Sprint inherited as part of its merger with Nextel has been both a boon and a burden. It’s been a success with many vertical customers, but is now outdated and adds further complex- ity to the multi-technology network. Hence it’s eventual decommissioning. “We still have vertical segments that like the Push To Talk (PTT) functional- ity of iDen and we need to preserve that relationship by giving them something better than they have today. But this upgrade also allows us to take down the iDen network and the costs associated with it. It’s been a burden but as we turn up the new network we are recreating the PTT experience on CDMA with better performance and coverage. In fact, we launched our first CDMA PTT phone on October 2, which is just the start of a portfolio we will use to migrate users over to CDMA,” says Bye. The device ecosystem is something
Bye considers as of the utmost impor- tance. The operator plans to launch dual mode CDMA/LTE devices by mid- 2012, with approximately 15 devices— including handsets, tablets and data cards—set to hit shelves throughout the year. The CDMA/WiMAX devices that Sprint currently offers, such as
18
the Nexus S 4G, will continue to be sold throughout 2012. According to Bye, the biggest chal- lenge in the industry right now is how many spectrum frequencies you can squeeze into a device, in order to ensure global roaming, capacity and keep the device cost effective. A tall order in a world that is moving from being one dominated by voice to one dominated by data. “It’s a moving target that presents
a technology challenge for all of us in the industry,” says Bye. “Not long ago people were struggling to put dual band radios together, now we’re talking about hexaband. “But it’s a good thing that devices are getting bigger,” he says referring to the tablet trend. “It was more chal- lenging when devices were getting smaller but now we have more real estate to play with. These devices are more of a mobile computing device than a cellphone.” As an industry we will continue to
be challenged by the data demands on the network and will continually be looking for ways to improve spectral capability and network performance. In the past when voice was king, it was these demands that drove the network model. “Voice is deterministic. People would talk in minutes and it was easier to plan for capacity. Networks were semi static,” Bye says. “But with data, we are moving to a supply con- strained model. If you put in capacity, users will take advantage of it. We have moved from feature phones to mobile computing devices and usage on those devices is taking advantage of the capacity available. This makes life very challenging as a network planner as you have a more dynamic load,” he says.
“To build and manage a network
today is now an order of magnitude more complex than it was for voice. So in order to deliver a satisfactory experience we’ve got to make sure the network can support that data but we cannot forget about voice as this is still the biggest indicator to the customer of the quality of the network.”
An oft quoted phrase in this indus- try is that the customer experience counts more than anything. So as an engineer, Bye’s task is to deliver the experience the customer expects but to do it cost effectively. “It’s easy for us to get to enamoured by technology,” he says, “But customers don’t care. Our job is to hide that complexity and give customers what service they expect regardless of what the pipe is. “If you peel apart the acronyms:
LTE; WiMAX; whatever, you’re fun- damentally talking about an OFDM technology. So that’s what you’re put- ting on the chipset. While the acronym has shifted from WiMAX to LTE, we already have a lot of learning on the OFDM front as the first carrier to launch WiMAX,” he says. “So last year, Network Vision, was the beginning of that journey. Our next generation, multi mode basestation technology. Adding LTE is a much smoother migration than it would have been otherwise. Other carriers are essentially building out a new network, but we’ve said no, lets go back and rebuild and re-engineer our CDMA network onto a new platform that now makes it easier for us to upgrade to LTE or whatever might come next in terms of LTE Advanced or future releases. We now have a much more future proof platform that we had before.” n
Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44